font.is

Cus­tomize Quick­Look for fonts

Quick­Look, the abil­ity to see a quick pre­view of files and fold­ers sim­ply by select­ing and then press­ing the Space bar has been avail­able for some time now.

This is a great time saver and gives access to infor­ma­tion that in many cases you would oth­er­wise have to install spe­cific soft­ware to get. Quick­Look can view was num­ber of for­mats but it is pos­si­ble to extent its use by adding plug-ins to it. Most of them are free. Some soft­ware devel­op­ers offer plug-ins for Quick­Look for their soft­ware if Quick­Look does not pre­view files made by their software.

One of Quick­Look great­est fea­tures in my opin­ion is that it can pre­view fonts. Not only to see if it’s the font I am look­ing for, but also to see if the six glyphs spe­cific for the Ice­landic lan­guage, are in the font (which is a com­mon prob­lem) or, if they are, to see if they are drawn in a proper way and usable.

The prob­lem how­ever is that Quick­Look does not have a char­ac­ter table for Ice­landic, but the Eng­lish one is used, leav­ing out those glyphs I am after. I have not thor­oughly inves­ti­gated this prob­lem for other non-English lan­guages, but it seems that some other lan­guages are deal­ing with a sim­i­lar prob­lem. So how can we get around this?

I asked around and finally got a great help on the macosxhints.com forum from Hal Ito­sis, who by the way is not into fonts at all as he says. The dis­cus­sion between me and Hal can be read in the link. But here is a shorter ver­sion – and less nerdy, on how to cus­tomize Quick­Look for fonts based on what Hal told me.

First of all you have to have admin rights to your com­puter. I assume that every­one who is will­ing to try this out has full rights.

The var­i­ous char­ac­ter sets that Quick­Look presents are based on the lan­guage which is the pri­mary lan­guage you are using. The char­ac­ter sets are are kept in a file called SampleSupport.plist which is found at:
/System
/Library
/Frameworks
/ApplicationServices.framework
/Versions
/A
/Frameworks
/CoreText.framework
/Versions
/A
/Resources
/SampleSupport.plist

Copy this path and in Finder go: Com­mand + Shift + G and paste the path into the field and you will instantly brought to the right place.

Drag a copy of this file to a dif­fer­ent place in your com­puter. I rec­om­mend that you make a folder for it called QuiclLookFonts_IS (IS, CZ..etc. being your lan­guage) The rea­son is that it’s good to keep a copy of this file for later because it will be over­writ­ten in major sys­tem upgrades.

Open this file in TextE­dit or another favorite text edi­tor (not Word or any word processor).

Now you have to find your lan­guage. If you are into this any­way you prob­a­bly know already what fits. Many of the Euro­pean lan­guages like Ital­ian are using the en table because Ital­ians don’t need to see any funny dia­crit­ics, but coun­tries like Hun­gary (hu) and Poland (pl) are using the cs table. How­ever the cs table does not fully cover each and every lan­guage in East Europe.

Char­ac­ters shown in the cs table: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ąbčdėfghijklmnopqřstůvwxyž

In the case of Ice­landic the en table is used and this the one I want to change. I sim­ply type in the char­ac­ters I want to add. I pre­ferred not to have it in its alpha­bet­i­cal order sim­ply because their exis­tence in the font is what I want quickly to get infor­ma­tion on. In the case where the cs table is used a Czech mac user would look into that table for changes.

I marked my changes in yel­low. I could go fur­ther and add all of the dia­crit­ics but as they are present in other lan­guages they are more likely to be included. I might though do it in next run.

Save the file as text file. Drag a copy over the orig­i­nal file to replace it. You will be asked for authen­ti­ca­tion. Restart is rec­om­mended but not vital.